In 1996,
The Oprah Winfrey Show introduced Oprah’s Book Club – and the publishing world has never been the same.
Since Oprah selected her first work,
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, books – fiction, non-fiction, troubled memoirs – have skyrocketed to popularity. And the episodes in which Oprah discussed the book, typically with the author present, are some of the most popular interviews the talk show host has conducted.
Below, you will find titles chosen in 2008:
The story of an immigrant who buys a foreclosed home – only to have to deal with the original owner’s over-the-top and deadly attempts to get it back.
The twisting tale of a young woman and her sister’s baby in the stoic and forbidding landscape of middle America in 1919.
Samantha Morrow's husband divorces her, and Samantha must take in lodgers to pay the mortgage on her elaborate house. Her experiences enable her to find out who she really is, to become more independent, and even - surprisingly - to reject a chance to reclaim her old life.
In 1959, a missionary named Nathan Price transports his wife and four daughters to a remote village in the Belgian Congo to convert the natives. The family is met with hostility from the locals, particularly a vengeful witch doctor.
Jo Becker, a happily married middle-aged woman, finds virtually every aspect of her stability threatened when an old friend named Eli Mayhew comes to town. Eli reminds Jo of her life as a counterculture free spirit in the '60s, when the murder of her best friend--still unsolved—shattered her life.
In this novel about the nature of black identity, narrated by Pecola's friend Claudia, we learn that Pecola was raped by her father, and is plagued with a desire to be white.
Times are tough in the Altmyer family. With the maniacally abusive Mr. Altmyer dead and Mrs. Altmyer serving time for his murder, adolescent, hormone-raging Harley has just inherited the role of caretaker for his three younger sisters.
During the California Gold Rush, Eliza Sommers, raised as an adopted daughter in a wealthy Chilean family, follows her flamboyant lover to California--partly as a way of beginning her life over again.
In turn-of-the-century Appalachia, Julie Harmon marries and faces a hard life of subsistence farming: a constant struggle against not only nature but the unpredictable humans who inhabit her world.
